Developer Diaries

Saints Row Developer Diary #1

We kick off our new series of exclusive developer diaries detailing THQ's Saints Row.

GameSpy is pleased to present the first in a series of exclusive, insightful developer diaries for THQ's upcoming Xbox 360 title Saints Row. Kicking off the proceedings today is design director Christopher Stockman, who talks about some of the design decisions made on the project.

My name is Christopher Stockman and I'm the design director for Saints Row. In today's diary I discuss some of the design philosophies in the game. Topics include game structure, size of the city, controls, and a few other interesting subjects. Let's dive right in.

Game Structure

The goal in Saints Row is for the player to be able to experience the game any way they choose. We didn't want to restrict open-world fans to one story, and thus decided to create multiple stories based on a variety of different mini-missions (we call them Activities) that allow players to progress through the game. The idea was to put the "O" back in open world. One obvious conflict we had early on was balancing the desire for maximum freedom with the desire for some form of storyline. Stories, by definition, are fairly linear experiences, so the two goals conflicted with each other.

On one hand, we wanted to create this incredible open-world experience where the player could progress however he wants, and on the other we wanted a story that would draw players in. In the end, we created a great combination of the two, with three separate stories in the game and the option to play them in any order the player desires (that is, they can complete as little or as much of one story before starting another).

Each story has unique characters, unique missions, and an overall unique theme to it. Outside of missions, we have 13 different activities the player can participate in to earn respect. Respect is then used as a currency of sorts to unlock missions. Completing the missions will earn the player territories, with the ultimate goal of conquering the city and beating the game. Gamers will definitely get the most in-depth story experience and the most freedom they've seen in this type of game.

Size of Stilwater

The city of Stilwater has gone through many size revisions. During pre-production we picked what type of districts we wanted, and then pieced them together (much like a puzzle) to create Stilwater. We actually designed the city before the story so that the artists could get down to business laying out the transportation network (roads, rails, highways). Once the city was roughed in the engine, we started driving around to get a general feel for the size (looking at paper can only get you so far). Our first thoughts were that it was way too small, so we went ahead and quadrupled the city dimensions! But after doing a quick sanity check on what it would take to build a city of that size, we pulled it back in to its current dimensions.

After the general layout was done, we started doing a more detailed map which included road layout, buildings, bodies of water, etc. This took quite some time seeing as we were working on our story simultaneously (and core game structure) and wanted the map to include stores, activity locations, mission-related buildings, etc. We moved a lot of stuff around (much to the chagrin of our city artists) to balance out the city, making sure there wasn't one area with more interactive structures than the other. The end result is that the entire city is full of things to see and do.